• Bardo is ME

    Bardo is ME

    Coming soon....

  • Covid Bardos June 2020

    Covid Bardos June 2020


    In the dream bardo that is now, the dead whisper, wander in and out, sample food, open the refrigerator, look for shaving cream, comment on recipes. They remind me to eat, to take a bath now and then, to be sure to drink a lot of water and wear clean underwear. And I listen to them with affection. We bump along together conversing about who and how and why these things happened. I stir my stews, they watch. A tiny praying mantis waves from the doorsill.

    A fence lizard eyes me and drinks rapidly from the terra cotta saucer beneath the coral bells. The three does are munching silky new greens below my window and a not so small rattlesnake has taken up residence near the split in the driveway. It is summer and thunderous. I do not know which world I inhabit some days and even that is paradoxical. I savor time in all its flavors and layers and if I do not scare myself, I can float freely enjoying the ride. Yesterday I heard a loud noise very early and half asleep identified it in all certainty as oh, Dad is opening the garage door in a house long since sold, my father long since dead, but the somatic memory keen.

    My neighbor Cheryl generously brings me packages from their mailbox so I don’t have to go into town and wait in line in my face mask. The donkeys bray every morning for their breakfast and the local dogs bark and set each other off like we do. Who’s hearing? I hear crickets outside after the rain.

    I am struck sometimes by the quiet beauty of my small house. The fans whir, the breeze whips the curtains and blows my notes across the studio table, the lantern-like lights in corners and shadows that fold into the peaks of my ceiling. That is something I guess, the exchange with this place for beauty’s sake. And the stories I tell for Tula on zoom. ‘Except there’s the virus Grammy.’ She says glumly when we talk about what we might do together if things were otherwise.

    I’ve decided to wear whatever I want. Fancy pants and earrings or pajamas all day, my spotted bathrobe. Same thing with food: pancakes for dinner soup for breakfast. A small rebellion against who? Who is rebelling? And then everyone is rebelling and there is a pulse and some of the floorboards are rotten and a man can not breathe and neither can I.

    Overnight all the new cows in the neighboring pasture have bells on and the cacophony echoes the news. The protests. A brush fire rages fueled by big winds. Another forgotten ancestor groans. I think about death and taxes. Who are we? Who is crying? Who is scrambling eggs?

  • How I became a Ghost & Back Again

    How I became a Ghost & Back Again

    Published in PZI's Uncertainty.club Issue 5 October 2020 as How I Became a Ghost and Back Again

    Qian Stayed – Corey Hitchcock 2020

    Gone!

    Fire season’s hot breath scorched on into November. After five unnerving months I was still alive, but not unscathed. Raw, edgy and worn out by power outages, wind alerts and small, dangerous fires. Then the weather demons did a turnabout and a final fire outage-alert yielded overnight to a dizzying snowstorm. Within a week of the big snow, as things began to new-normalize, I answered a breathless call from one of my sisters. Our youngest niece was gone, dead by her own hand. I felt myself tip and fall, like Qian, into bed. Fire is dangerous, but alive. This death had snuffed out my ordinary joy in living.

    A Ghost

    ‘What is this?’, I asked the I Ching, Oracle of Change. ‘Bound!’ the Oracle responded. That cautious hexagram’s moving line (me) had no field of activity. Exactly, I thought. No volition, no spark. I cooked tasteless meals, and woke unrested. Even small tasks were impossible. I was at once anxious, restless and paralyzed. One night, as I lay stiffly in my bed feeling into that numinous state between waking and sleeping, a ghost man came through the wall, completely attuned to his own misery and loneliness. Breathing with effort, he got into bed beside me. Not young, not old, he was dressed for a funeral and lay down fully clothed on top of the covers. He did not look at me, nor was he particularly frightening. I am not even sure he knew I was there. I’m attracting ghosts, I said out loud. Maybe I’m becoming a ghost.


    A Dream

    The next night I dreamed:

    I have in my closet a wonderful ancestral dress. It is cream colored and composed of many layers of lace and veil. It is a ritual dress, long like a wedding dress but not to be worn at a wedding. I meet a man I don’t know well who admires the dress. Thinking, ‘I don’t really need it’, I give it to him. This causes my father’s face to loom in fury at my disregard for this dress I’ve been given. Was it given by him? He does not speak, but glares fiercely and I feel intense shame that I have carelessly given away my ancient and precious heritage.

    Another man appears carrying a drum and a small wooden ‘puzzle box’. He is ritually dressed and identified as an ‘ancestor’. Attached to the box is a small curved dagger, and inside is an amulet, finely engraved with the image of a woman wearing that wonderful dress. The ancestor uses this curved dagger to sever the strange man’s attachment to my dress. ‘It must be returned!’, he shouts. And in this dream moment I feel relief because I know his words have made it so.

    Breath fills my lungs again.

    Breathing in the Dark

    After the dream I discovered a fingernail hold of courage to peer further into the darkness. Its atmosphere seemed suffocating. How could I meet it? It was killing. I pictured myself holding onto an enormous stone and sinking. When I hit bottom, I breathed into the dark vastness, tentatively at first, and then in huge satisfying gulps. Instead of Dante’s fearful inferno, I found the comforting warmth of a hearth.
    Memories and pleasant sensations flooded me. Colors returned and dazzled me – shimmering coral, the exact blue of a Bluebird’s wing, the delirious green of new grass. My beloved grandmother was there, sitting quietly, radiating her unconditional love. My brother long dead, so full of intelligence and wit gazed at me with affection. The stunning opalescent light of my birth city, San Francisco, enfolded me in the salty shimmer of the bay. Singing with friends, comforted by a herd of deer, running in moss; moments of deep play, swimming in warm ocean water. Smelled seaweed, horses, Plumeria; touched the honey colored pine walls of a favorite cabin. I fell back into endless summer afternoons, watched shadows, waves, insects, fish. All my long-dead cats bathed and purred beside me. I felt the depth of friendships with people I did not see often enough – we were still connected. Our separation was tenderly held here. All this was alive in the dark below.


    Qian Stayed

    From this contented dark center, I took a new look at the place I‘d fallen from. Up there, in the light of day, I briefly practiced re-appearing . I sketched an image of my head popping through an imaginary portal into the light above. To my horror, I had drawn myself as a somber puppet head.
    My zones had reversed – the place I had feared to inhabit was now alive and familiar, a pulsing, sourced center. Now the light of day flattened everything, including me. A deep reversal in my determining atoms had occurred. Something akin to a polar shift wrenched me around to see the truth and richness of my entire life. What I had held as deadly I now saw as vital. Had I received a turning word? I don’t know. Could I live in both places? Had Qian?
    What about the Qian who stayed?

    The one who is lying unconscious in her childhood bed. Did she fall into her own dark center to save herself? Was Qian returned to herself the way my ancestral dress was returned to me? This Qian who stayed drew me close in a sisterly embrace. I had thought of her as confined for years in a grey room between life and death. I saw now that she had sunk down and been protected and nourished by her ancestors. She had sheltered that hidden vastness that dwells at the center of every life. Held there, she allowed herself to return, lifting the father’s inadvertent curse.

    Me too! An ancestor brought the dress made just for me. I allowed myself to put it on. The dark materials I had feared would snuff me out now rippled with the beauty and fullness of my life. I thought I had lost this dress, this gift, forever. Now I saw that was impossible. And so, yes, I could live in both worlds, because they were one in me. I had the freedom to choose my treasures, to ‘take them and use them however I wished!’
    Qian and I could wear our dream dresses, we had returned.

  • The Dreaming Garden

    The Dreaming Garden

    The tangled garden has belonged to the birds and insects since fall. No activity. No compost added. No nurturing beds of rice straw. Weeds still clog the paths. Not a single winter crop planted. A determined malaise so pervasive I am not sure it will ever lift. The chill wind is whipping around limp, frost burned vines and stalks, the last of summer’s frenzied growth, now impressively decaying. I conjure up last year’s scorching fall, when waves of heat finally sparked dangerous fires that showered us with grey ash from neighboring townships.

    I rolled into winter’s cave like a bear when the rains finally came. While a new storm raged, I dreamed of an old acquaintance, a planner of large projects and unending intellectual arguments, which never allowed him to bring anything to fruition. He over-thought life and was largely oppositional. Perhaps life had cheated him of opportunities and fame? But here, in my dream he was full of natural ambition and organic intelligence. He was boundlessly creative, and worked calmly, carelessly naked, so absorbed was he in following each complex project to satisfying completion. He moved objects around in a large, bright room as he reconfigured his schemes. He was no longer getting in his own way. I was impressed, amazed. How had I not seen this capacity in him?

    I caught his fierce focus as my own and began to paint large colorful orbs on, of all things, long sheets of waxed paper. I saw so clearly each step: how I scratched into the newly painted areas, the exact colors I chose and brushed in place. I saw and felt myself absorbed. I remembered this sensation of limber responsiveness in my body.

    Waking up, I stumbled barefooted, half asleep into the chilly studio to duplicate the dream painting. I caught its magic, the numinous breath of that place between worlds, before thought.

    Later with spots of color still on my fingertips, I braved the garden again. This time I could see the dream of summer, the tall, scarlet Amaranth plumes entwined with Ancho peppers, icy green cabbages tumbled at their roots, immense tomatoes ripening outside of their cages, the unstoppable Mexican Sunflowers that bloomed right through December, feathery Quinoa, soothing, wide-eyed Comfrey, and moon-maiden Nicotiana. I saw them all rising again from ash and mildew. I was germinating along with them. My painted fingers gently tugged at the lanky, yellowed stems of Arugula, which even now the first sleepy bees were deliriously probing.

    I believe we will make it again after all.

    Comments

  • Saving Everything – Corey Hitchcock

    Saving Everything – Corey Hitchcock

    Can you learn how to save everything without losing everything first?

    My grandfather was a young man riding high when the crash of ‘29 took away everything he had except his determination never to be fooled again. I knew him for a lifelong skeptic of intangible values; my mother if she were alive would call him a hoarder; but he thought of himself as a salvage expert. “Salvage” denotes something saved—historically, anything recovered or rescued from loss at sea—and I believe he must have been very much at sea during those first years of the Depression, and that he never personally reinvested in the prosperity that came during and after the war. He’d been a tough San Francisco building inspector in the 50's and 60's, and knew from construction materials. Once lost in that wave of intangibles, he salvaged himself and then stuck to what he knew to be real.

    Growing up, my weekends were spent at his hip-roofed, cobbled-together bayside refuge we called “The Ark.” Part family midden, part playground, the cabin had itself floated in as a barge-bottomed houseboat, but now perched on wooden pilings above the salt marsh. Accessible only by tramping down a long clattering boardwalk or by boat at high tide, it was handy to tidal flotsam and jetsam. The Ark was surrounded on all sides by platforms stacked with whatever my grandfather deemed possibly reusable, plus three small shingled sheds containing separate sub-categories of valuables. Much he got free—which naturally added value—even if snatched at some risk from the incoming tide, as he teetered at the edge of the dock with a gaff hook.

    Along with saving anything building-related—tools, lumber, hardware, paint, all types of brushes, lead sinkers, toilets, sinks, plumbing fittings—he was thrifty to a fault. Drawers exploded with coils of string, pennies in red wrappers, extra brass key matts and rubber bands. He never saw a free phone book or calendar he couldn’t use, or a tool he would not restore. Brass was sacred, and along the way he'd acquired the original salt-corroded steel lamps off the Golden Gate Bridge. Huge barrels of linseed oil glued themselves over time to the floor of the tool shed; fifty or more fly-fishing rods, some of valuable Tonkin cane, balanced in the rafters. Another shed, accessed by a steep plank over the marsh, was piled to the roof with thick white, indestructible restaurant china, extra rowboat oars, duck decoys, and fishing floats. No one believed he knew everything that was there, but if anything went missing there was certain hell to pay.

    ‘All this junk, Dad!’ my mother would say. Her love for the Ark was real, but so was her shame about what she was sure must appear to others as shabby, eccentric, and poor. My grandfather would just grunt. He did not discuss his operations with her or with anyone else who did not understand that these were objects of real value, neglected by the foolish and ignorant proponents of the new. He was speechless when he discovered that my mother, tired of tripping over a massive box of metal fittings, had one day secretly tipped it into the black bay mud.

    It seems to me now that my grandfather not only loved, but perhaps saw himself in all this outdated, discarded, once desirable bounty. These wasted treasures stood for something in himself. Some piece of his broken heart. Some dream of acknowledged success. For myself, it gave birth to the mystery of making: shaping this from that, something from something else. I remember him, cigar stub clamped in his mouth, showing us how to make our own sinkers by melting lead and pouring it into finger holes in the wet sand.

    There's a moth, called the Caddis fly, which in its larval stage lives underwater within a self-created “case” of silk and substrate debris—this exoskeleton of twigs and tiny pebbles and sand protects its soft abdomen until it is ready to emerge. A kindred spirit for my grandfather. After he died, I lived at the Ark for a time, trying to clean things up to restore, or rent, or sell it. Trying, maybe, to save it.




  • In the Pink - a zen koan response

    In the Pink - a zen koan response

    Here's a koan: 'Lingyun was wandering in the mountains and became lost in his walking. he came around a bend and saw peach blossoms in an orchard across the valley. He was awakened and wrote this poem:
    For thirty years I have searched for a master swordsman. How many times did the leaves fall and the buds burst forth? Since I've seen the peach blossoms I've have no doubt.'

    There is an old expression of optimum health that declares you are 'In the pink' the full bloom of health and abundance. This koan brought me into another kind of pink abundance, enveloping me in the field of blossoms.

  • The Point of a Needle

    The Point of a Needle


    Koan: How is it that a one who can dive to the bottom of the sea and count the grains of sand, sits on the point of a needle?

    How have I skewered myself? Let me count the ways. I wanted to avoid the point of this koan and initially when sitting with it, I made myself so small that the point of that needle was inconsequential. Except it was really still there. And this escapist vision of mine was part of my particular ‘point’. The point being that I was skipping the point! And so I had to return to the question. HOW is it? I found all kinds of reasons for avoidance and preoccupation, because there always are so many in life – the chaos of political landscape, my smashed in car window among them.

    But finally I sat on the needle and carefully, slowly named my skewering ways. What they all had in common was that they took me out of the moment. I was skipping out. And you just can’t keep on doing that – well, you can, but let me count some of the ways I noticed I was exercising. Let’s see: there’s knee-jerk blaming, shaming myself and judging others, creating a bubble of otherness, which takes enormous energy, deflecting gifts freely offered, denying myself the delight of creative exploration, or a new friendship, resigning myself to any number of limiting stories I already know are decrepit and blatantly untrue. And the drama of yearning for a ‘rescue’ I might not need.

    I started to see/feel that enlivening point everywhere – Ouch. But also, a sharp delight in seeing it at work. Humbling. That’s what this awareness-enhancing koan is. So after your delicious dive in the deep of the ocean, take an inventory – it helps. Looking forward to being with you to explore all of this and whatever arises.

  • Impossible Nourishment

    Impossible Nourishment

    Impossible Nourishment with Corey Hitchcock

    WEDNESDAY, Oct. 24th
    Rockridge Meditation Community
    Oakland, CA
    KOAN: On a mountaintop, clouds boil rice.

    This koan visited me at sesshin last week, atop Mt. Madonna. I like that clouds create nourishment. It’s not something that seems possible for clouds to do, but when you are hungry in a certain way, you can feast on a view. Right before sesshin, I had a disturbing big dream. This often happens for me.

    The short version is that my mother had just died. I covered her up ritually with a blue cloth and forgot about her. (Actually my mother died many years ago). It appeared that she had then been dismembered and wrapped up in the freezer for food. In another vignette I watched my granddaughter eat a piece of her with a fork. Say what? I woke up mildly horrified, but also as I sat with the imagery, I was able to see my mother as nourishing me, and all of her descendants. Her intensity, lifeforce and even culinary skills, are still in us.

    There are of course more mysterious implications here. I think this is the same kind of nourishment the clouds boil up.

    What’s cooking on your mountaintop?

  • A Cart is A Cart- Even Apart

    A Cart is A Cart- Even Apart

    A Cart Is A Cart, Even Apart – Meditation & Teaching with Corey Hitchcock

    Monday, 12/10, 7pm-9pm SRCZC Santa Rosa, CA
    Koan: ‘The master cart maker makes a cart. If (s)he removes the axel and wheels what is vividly apparent?’

    When anything is taken apart, a grandmother’s favorite recipe, a song, a family, an emergency rescue, or successful surgery, what is revealed?

    The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

    My first insight on hearing this koan was – ‘Hey, my cart is still rolling. I can see the wheels, and feel it as whole, and that is crazy, right?’

    Well, maybe, but when I dropped this koan onto an old relationship, that cart was still in working order even though I had not really wanted it to be, likewise a discarded writing project, a painting, my old cat who disappeared into the forest. Everything is greater than the sum of its parts. What is that wondrous universal glue that wires us so beautifully for connection?

    A Master Cart Maker becomes the cart he is building and that includes all of its formless functions. He can find a problem spoke, or axel by listening closely and becoming that wheel.

    As part of an art project, I once created a ‘New Non-Periodic Table of Elements’. It introduces elements like: Embrasium, Adaptium, Frustratium and Bemusium instead of Chromium or Uranium. Fifty-four ‘newly discovered’ elements. The point was that I was opposed to the reductive sum of all the elements that would be left in little piles after my body was dissolved.

    Even disassembled a cart, or anything has its wholeness story still rolling along. When did it begin? How are you put together? What happens when you, Master Builder, take your cart apart? What path is it still traveling? What is vividly apparent?

    Looking forward to being with you. Corey

  • No Direction Home

    No Direction Home

    Squatting on a fissured ridge-top in the Sierras, I run my finger along an ancient line etched by rocks dragging in glacial ice. Around me on the expansive stone surface, tiny repetitive patterns reveal themselves. These marks: snakes, hands, eclipsed suns, animals and what look like maps, were painstakingly pecked into being by hands like mine. I am drawn to this exposed landscape for traces of a deep relatedness I crave in this turbulent time. This place has a resonance for me. So much seems lost of our conversation with this remarkable planet.

    Grinding holes near the pictographs are all the same size and depth, evenly spaced for communal pounding of medicines and food. I hear and see people across time, laughing and gesturing, working together. This place at the confluence of rivers was once home to many people, a generous rest-stop after a long, difficult migration. This sanctuary reverberates like a bow drawn slowly across the strings of a cello. All living beings, plants, stones and rivers are included. Near me, a bright green Praying Mantis and a tiny, ebony Fence Lizard face off on a huge granite erratic. The enormous uncrossable sheet of ice which deposited it, is now just a ghost. Things change. Even very large and unimpeachable things like glaciers, like home.

    A friend from long ago invited me to visit her and her new partner in their mobile home, a two vehicle caravan they now live in as they wander back and forth across the continent. The forested RV park they were temporarily living in was enormous and packed with vehicles of every size and shape. Is this the new normal? I left as quickly as I could, sweating in fear of this lifestyle as a necessary choice. And yet, is home necessarily stationary?

    This morning as I packed to leave for my hike, a tiny fawn, still in spots, mewled in confusion at a new wire fence. The comforting scents of mother, home, family had somehow misled him. He could find no way to follow them past this strange obstruction. What is the strange new obstruction that intersects my understanding of home, safety, ease? Are we all feeling this surprising disconnect?

    A Zen koan asks: Why can’t an enlightened woman free herself from prisons drawn on the ground? Well, who decides to draw them? I ask myself. Ancient people were always moving. Is my concept of home a prison on the ground?

    I catch the insistent shimmer of unobstructed ease.

  • Beautiful Speedbumps

    Beautiful Speedbumps

    Go straight on a mountain road with 99 curves
    Beautiful Speedbumps

    I took this photo while walking near my home. Remarkably enough it is a speed-bump on my winding rural road. They are there to slow people down so they don’t run over innocent animals, or other humans while rushing headlong to take care of daily business. But is there anything more annoying than a speed bump when you are wrapped up in your dream of forward momentum?

    These odd bumps have always seemed darkly comical to me as I check my speedometer in the middle of an oak forest. The notion of living ‘in the country’ to enjoy the slower pace of life, and then needing speed bumps to remind me that beings can actually die from my forgetting. Delusion can kill you. Wow. I see that. I have learned to bless the small animal bodies, avoid them, and then turn away and travel on. It reminds me of a war term for the dead: collateral damage.

    This road is also a place I can walk without getting in my car, the better to drive to a trail for a hike. So it is convenient, but not what I think of as inspiring - it is not what I want. I noticed I was feeling oppositional to everything about it. Not just the speed bumps and signs for them, but the litter by residents, the fractured surface of the road, the stupidity of the power poles, the lack of life and care. I decided to take my camera out as an ally for finding a new perspective.

    These yellowed, asphalt bumps have always interested me, and made me laugh at my relentless preoccupation, but I never saw their beauty until I slowed myself way down to a snail’s pace and explored the actual road. I highly recommend this. We are all so used to traveling with greatest possible speed, but look at what comes up on the road when you slow way down.

    In my most recent encounter with this koan I discovered that going straight did not necessarily imply movement of any kind. I saw myself as the road, full of all the fractures and speckles. And then was visited by vivid views of other places I have tucked away emotionally as ‘no visit’ zones - I ventured into my childhood home and saw each room and the layout in incredible detail. I had no idea that I remembered this. I saw my blind grandmother as my guide, sitting as she often did quietly, meditating in my parent’s blue bedroom. Another gift of the ultimate. slowdown. Not about doing, or going at all. Those speedbumps became my best friends - they had pointed the way. Now when I walk the road I feel the lightness, that intimate touch of the universe.

    From a koan report given at Pacific Zen Institute's Rockridge Meditation Center in Oakland - The Zen koan that helped me out was: 'Go straight on a mountain road with 99 curves'.

    NOTE: This piece was published in Pacific Zen Institute's Uncertainty Club - Online magazine of Zen and the Arts. Issue 4 - Freely I Watch the Tracks of The Flying Birds January 2019

  • Am I a Ghost?

    Am I a Ghost?

    Am I a Ghost? by Corey Hitchcock

    I woke up in the middle of the night and noticed a blueish light illuminating my other larger studio room. Oh drat, I thought I forgot to turn the light off. Unusual for me because I crave the quiet dark here at night. I meant to get up and turn it off, but must have fallen back to sleep because I woke again about an hour later by the clock and there was no light on in the other room. I got up this time and tried to duplicate the light I had seen, but nothing I turned on was the source.

    I couldn't go back to sleep and reviewed the strange events of my day with increasing panic. Everything had seemed ghostly to me including my local koan group which had a strangely unformatted meeting - no one was set up to lead, the host thought it was a week off, we used a small frying pan for the missing bell. Normally I would be able to laugh or shake off this absurdity, but now it was propelling my ghostliness.

    I began to feel that perhaps I was the ghost in my own life. I understood Butoh suddenly from the inside out. I was trying to hold on to things that were not alive. Maybe I was the representative of things that were not alive. Or was this just the proximity of ghostly breath that abounds? Our hungry ghost president and congress, my somewhat fractured extended family, the ghost of usual celebrations, the somnambulance of comfortable responses, the strange late winter and group of deer at my door silently asking - is it spring? Maybe they were asking if they were alive. And overall the replacement of intimate touch and conversation with the ghostly internet.

    Could this be my zen koan - The stone woman gives birth in the middle of the night having its way with me? Can I tag it to my re-reading an article on a zen priest's belated response to the influx of ghosts after the tsunami? Maybe, but I began to see the many places I seek connection and don't find it. And the many places I don't fully respond. I don't have a bow to tie up this ghostly deliberation with. Still in it. I have noticed a release from a confinement I did not know I was perpetuating. So perhaps being a ghost is incredibly liberating.

    Meanwhile, I am going out to dig in my neglected garden.

    Will be published in: The Mountain Stream Meditation Community Quarterly - Summer 2018

  • Hiding in a Pillar With Mixed Results

    Hiding in a Pillar With Mixed Results

    Hiding in a Pillar With Mixed Results
    with Corey Hitchcock

    Zen koan:
    Hide in a pillar. from a koan talk given at PZI's RMC in Oakland, CA

    Can this be done? Once during an overwhelming period of my life, I created a long black cylinder of lightweight fabric which I hung from the ceiling of my studio. I moved a chair into its darkened center and sat down. Relief flooded me. Like a blinkered horse I was soothed back into my own experience.

    Of course I sometimes also practice hiding in plain sight, which is another thing entirely. It is another way of leaving the moment. Of deflecting what the generous universe has in store for me.

    A pillar is impermeable, a solid column of dense rock. Or is it? What is your pillar made of? Why do we need to hide when we do? And how? What if our pillar was permeable?

    Corey


    I liked to hide when I was a kid. Under the long table at Thanksgiving I was much more comfortable with the legs, shoes and stockings of my extended family than I was with their teasing and loud chatter. And I kept that kind of thing up with mixed results. I had an uncle who would call me out on my hiding and make a spectacle of me. If I was quiet my mother said I was sulking and got upset – I was hiding something from her and she didn’t like it. Mean girls at school would just not understand my solitude or unwillingness to play with them and tease me or shun me. I never really expected to provoke but in some ways my hiding was my own exclusionary cover-up.

    You can’t really hide when you are pursuing truth in creative expression for me in visual art and writing. Well you can, and you can get away with it in conventional circles, but not at the cutting edge of things were comment matters. And if you try it won't go well for you with yourself.

    In grad school as I assembled my quirky sculptures videos and writings for my final show I suddenly felt disconnected from my creations. I needed to inhabit them literally to make sure there was life there. When I did so early in morning with a good friend recording my investigation in a nearby intersection I got the surprise of my life. Not a soul was afoot. It was still dark, before dawn when I donned a large sectioned black fabric tube. It was ten feet tall when I held it aloft from inside with my arms over my head and had a long black tail of fabric that dragged on the ground past my bare feet.

    The urban crows saw me and went into a frenzied screaming loud attack on something they could not figure out. I had to be a threat they figured. Only when I pulled off my costume did they stop and settle in nearby trees.

    More recently I realized that my pillar was not what I thought it was. I was never really hidden and it was more about a pillar of light than solitary darkness. I created a little koan-ic experiment with a large tube of paper. I cut regular holes in it and asked a friend to hold it up so I could spin it. Sure enough the light flickers through it and I could see right through it.

    Corey

  • Cosmic Inclusion

    Cosmic Inclusion

    Cosmic Inclusion - Corey Hitchcock

    I watched a bed of moss recover itself from the weight of my body. I had fallen asleep without meaning to in this sweet glade. What was it that allowed the moss to come back to itself so effortlessly? What core memory propelled each delicate branching strand to stand again? My living mattress encouraged vivid dreams and returned me to rested health. What inner alignment in my body encouraged me to seek out a wild resting place?

    Knowledge held in the body is often given less weight in daily decisions, a voice so close we tend to put it off. But I am made of mossy resilience. My body carries a profound capacity for renewal in every cell. We are cosmic antennae at play in a vast nourishing field. I stretch toward the sun, sleep, wake and drink water. Sometimes when I open my mouth stars fall out.

    A friend who was dying said with dark humor, ‘I am disassembling.’ And yet he thought with ease about writing his next book, reconfiguring his new home so he could work. He radically overestimated the time he had left, overriding messages from his body about shutting down, leaving. I was caught with him in that moment by his story and believed with him. Two days later in shock and grief, I reflected on how easily we are deceived by thoughts, the certainty of ongoing plans, our status in the world. How can I not continue to be here?

    Swimming in a pond full of lotuses beaming with magenta-tipped blooms, I splashed water droplets across the rough surface of a round leaf pad. The drops beaded like mirrored balls of mercury and reflected the entire scene in perfect miniature, me included, little myriad eyes of the universe. Floating in that green fecundity I reveled in the swirling bands of cool spring water mixing with the warmer surface currents. I was playing in that pond with friends in a crazy armada of floating craft; old rowboats, broken surfboards and a partially submerged redwood plank. I realized at some point that the pond was also playing with us, infusing us with its own messages of life and renewal. The watery essence of our bodies resonated with this other living being.

    When we returned in the afternoon to the meditation hall, we brought the pond’s cosmic message with us.

    Mountain Stream Quarterly Newsletter Fall, 2017

  • Zen Barista -Corey Hitchcock

    Zen Barista -Corey Hitchcock

    Coffee the secret plasma of a weeklong meditation retreat? Who knew? Beneath the insightful dharma talks, deep meditations and creative vegetarian menus, this odorous river of dark, very strong coffee coursed. And let no one say there is no coffee at 5 am before the first sit! That is entirely unacceptable, middle way or no, neglecting those damp grounds is grounds for shunning. Service is a part of any sangha's weeklong offsite sesshin, and my vow for this week: ‘I vow to never allow the coffee to run out’.

    ‘Don’t even think it.’, someone said without humor. The coffee-making machine at the rear of the lunchroom began to feel like a factory spewing peat colored liquid eighteen hours of every day and night. I was its faithful attendant, filling and dumping the pungent, frothy filtered grounds. A not so sacred spring, and me the keeper. Busy minds busier, I thought, not a coffee drinker myself. Zen koans and the art of keeping coffee flowing I thought.

    On a morning break I wandered near the large bronze bell used to call us to sit, and the heavy gongs to announce meals. The deep well of the sangha bell was studded outside with metal knobs the size of a man’s thumb and held the traces of sacred sounds as light blue orbs in photos I took of the inside. From my lunchroom coffee-maker window I could watch the timekeeper in her industrial headphones, pounding away like a fierce jazz percussionist, on the huge bell and wooden boards. Clanging out an ancient score to frighten off demons, rain or shine. The deep well of the four coffee thermoses were just as mysterious.

    Peering inside in predawn darkness I tested the height of liquid before running in to sit. I began to view the zendo as a zen hospital with treatment rooms, emergency room and busy liaisons as medical assistants, Roshis as learned doctors, their rakusus the badges of rank and specialization. Transfusions for transformative practice, guaranteed to clear the busy mind or throw it into blissful clarifying hyperdrive. Filters full of soggy black grounds piled up. Skunky bloodtype: Peet's Major Dickison blend, dispensed in silence to suffering and blissful meditators alike.

    'Which one is freshest?' A querant whispered earnestly, as I made pot after pot. 'Well, they are all pretty darn fresh.' I would reply replenishing as fast as humanly possible.

    Even one of the Roshis, unable to wait for the next pot to fill before dashing back to his interview room, stuck his cup without apology directly beneath the dark flow streaming between filter and pot. ‘I used to work in a lot of restaurants.’ he said.


    Zen Barista-Corey Hitchcock Published Mtn Stream Meditation Center Online quarterly 2016

  • Gas & Weather - Corey Hitchcock

    Gas & Weather - Corey Hitchcock

    Gas and Weather - Corey Hitchcock

    ‘What about these clouds? Are we in for some weather?’ Asked the vacationer from L.A. ‘Well, look at it this way,’ said the patient ranger. ‘You’ve got an eighty percent chance the weather will hold, and a twenty percent chance it won’t.’ The man’s anxiety was not alleviated. He needed to know that this would be a good vacation. The ranger him to another ranger who would hopefully help him achieve his camping desires.

    ‘I don’t care what the weather brings.’ I thought. It was close to ninety degrees in the high desert that day. There were a few clouds drifting over from the northeast. I got my camping permit and headed off to set up my tent, just before sunset, beneath a rugged peak in the eastern sierra.

    On an upward winding trail the next morning, I marveled at the profusion of wildflowers, and the healthy flow of the high-country waterfalls I could see originating well above me among barren peaks. The moment I got back to my car, heavy drops of rain sloshed down on my windshield.

    The gas gauge was insistent, but I did not want to pay exorbitant prices at the nearby lake resort. I remembered finding very cheap gas to the north. I decided to risk the drive. When I got there, the station had changed its prices from 2.74 several days before to over 4 dollars a gallon. Was this possible, legal? Was this the same station? Not at all what I expected.

    As I purchased my expensive gas, a glance through the windows behind the register revealed the darkest sky I had ever seen in daylight hours. A man next to me in line commented that this had come out of nowhere. The girl behind the register, looked at us placidly.

    The drive back began with a clap of thunder and slow progress up the pass, while spectacular forks of lightening attacked a nearby peak which looked more and more sulfurous. When I finally pulled into camp, it was abuzz with wool-capped campers shouting storm stories around soggy fires, and a dashboard thermometer registering 40 degrees. I had missed the cold heart of the storm, but there was a substantial mound of melting snow behind my tent, thankfully still reasonably dry. Everything else was soaked. I scrambled into warmer clothes.

    Gas and weather I thought, laughing at myself.

    Mtn Stream Med. Center Quarterly Newsletter fall 2015

  • Hiking the Edge - Corey Hitchcock

    Hiking the Edge - Corey Hitchcock


    Hiking the Edge - Corey Hitchcock,

    Letting go is serious business. But so is holding on. If I am holding on to a rock ledge, higher up than is good for me, I know there will be consequences if I let go.
    Maybe a helicopter ride, with the unpleasant possibility of broken limbs and months of tedious rehab. But, there are also places I hold on tightly when I do not need to; where there would be absolutely no danger in a release. And yet these ledges are the most difficult to navigate.

    What do I imagine will happen if I loosen my grip? Will I explode, fall apart, shrivel and die? That is unlikely. But a story can weave a powerful spell. It can hide the possibility of a deeper truth. In that moment, I am mezmerized and have to hold back until I discover a way to trust, to move beyond that familiar viewpoint.

    Once, on my first day in Zion National Park, I hiked straight up from the floor of the valley, on a steeply ascending trail. I met another hiker along the way, and we traveled on together. He said to me at one point, as we tired, moving steadily higher on the narrow switch-backing trail: ‘You are doing better than I did my first day! I got to this one point ahead, and just suddenly couldn’t go any further. I felt I would fall off the world.’

    And very soon, ahead of us, the trail made a sharp turn where it disappeared into oblivion. I scanned the deep shadowed valley, and the impossibly high cliffs on the opposite mesa. There was nothing between me, and the pull of that vast abyss. I sat down and could not get up. My body imposed vertigo, and refused to let me stand.

    My hiker friend said he was going on, because if he hesitated, he wouldn’t make the turn either. He encouraged me, and said he knew I would eventually make it too. The trail was perfectly safe, he said, it was an illusion I would eventually develop a capacity to move through without stopping.

    These junctures are becoming more familiar to me now. I walk more confidently through my tightly held beliefs, growing my capacity to move, step by step around each fearsome turn, breath upon breath toward that more expansive view.


    Mtn Stream Med. Center Online Quarterly Newsletter summer 2015